Hopefully, Amazon will learn it or make it a problem for the vendors.
I got in trouble (not much trouble, but still) for making the customer unhappy :/.
Other time, the LP manager and the customer service manager (who manages the front checkouts and cash) got colluded, and switched the direction of the camera near the cash counting area; then $10K cash was gone. Both managers got fired.
Another incident. One LP associate and another guy at the return counter ran a scam together by issuing store credit for things that are NOT returned. For every return there, LP associate has to sign off.
A rice cooker is a cylindrical item that usually comes in a rectangular box that leaves empty room in the corners. The LP associate was checking for additional unpurchased items in the box, not that you were getting a rice cooker.
Example: Employee takes a rice cooker off the shelf, puts high value electronics (memory, processors, etc) inside, reseals it with shrink wrap. He tells his friend on the outside to buy the rice cooker to smuggle it out. They then split the proceeds.
This probably goes on for weeks until the store wonders why they're suddenly selling so many rice cookers, but are already running low on Pentium Pros and 32 meg SIMMs.
I will go ahead and just go over to returns next time and go somewhere else.
towards the end, ie the last few years, when i brought an expensive-ish item to the counter, or more often when they brought it out of the cage for me to complete the purchase, i'd open the item at the counter in front of the cashier. 100% of the time the cashier would balk "hey you can't do that" (i hadn't paid yet), which is of course stupid to say. i just needed to verify that the item was new and also not a 52-switcheroo, as we used to call it.
recently (2019-2020) i've bought 2 damaged high end products from best buy. outer box perfect, inner product damaged. luckily BB is like amazon and has complete no-hassle returns.
more longer ago i've received a few duds from ebay and other non-amazon retail merchants. smaller value things i just write off but some of the bigger ones it's been painful getting the rep to take it back. the next time i do such a purchase i am setting up a camera to do an unboxing video.
I’ve only done it twice so far after getting really bad luck and back to back swapped items in May.
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On the other hand, my friend who sells on eBay frequently said even if I film myself packing up, sealing, and giving the same box to UPS or post office, EBay and PayPal (if they’re still doing eBay stuff) probably won’t care and side with buyer still.
A discount would be unreasonable, and getting your money back wouldn't improve your situation at all. Unless that was some kind of collector's item rice cooker.
(I do this at any store that checks receipts, except for Costco, because I don't want to risk them revoking my membership. Never had a problem.)
The problem is, it'd be trivial for someone with a sticker printer to slam a new label on the drive, saying 16TB. It'd be quite unrealistic to have Amazon own the tools and perform QA testing on all the millions of items on their site. You see a similar problem with knock off headphones, even plugging them in and listening to a song wouldn't be enough to find most fakes.
I think the only real solution is this to be fixed at the government level. At the moment it's too expensive and risky to go after customers, even when Amazon can determine they are running this scam. Either you get drawn into a legal battle trying to prove it, or you get labeled as evil Amazon going after the innocent little guy in the media. It's easiest for Amazon to just raise prices 1% and call it a day. Which is what Walmart does for theft/return fraud as well, and likely every company in the U.S.
There needs to be a law that makes it easy for Amazon (and other companies) to go "this account was found to have returned different merchandise 5 times, they need to pay $xxxx fine" and it to be done. But if even if one of these cases go to trial, it'd be at least a $5000 expense to Amazon.
As long as this is impossible in our legal system, these scammers will continue to thrive.
If amazon doesnt have capacity to verify products they are selling, they shouldnt be selling them. They are knowingly contributing to fraud and we write it off as "they're too big to regulate themselves"
Amazon could very easily prevent future returns from these customers, preventing them from running the scam.
It's a hard problem to solve, that's why people talk about it so much.
Or tamper-resistant RFID tags attached directly to the product.